News

Arson mobs in Egypt turn rage on Christians

St George’s Church, Cairo, is set alight. Many churches have been attacked (Mostafa Hussein)

WHEN a furious Muslim mob burst into the largely Christian area around his
home in Minya, 150 miles south of Cairo, Alexander Tawss, 60, a barber,
grabbed his gun and fired in the air to try to scare them away.

It proved a fatal error.

“They took offence at the fact that a Christian fired in the air against them,
and they stormed his home and shot him to death before taking his body away
and hacking it into parts,” Ayoub Youssef, 40, a Coptic Christian priest,
said yesterday.

Then the mob dumped Tawss’s remains in a graveyard.

“We have not been able to visit the graveyard to collect his body parts and to
this day he has not been given a burial,” Youssef said.

“It is a ploy to get his family or any one of us to go to the graveyard and
then kill us, too,” he said. “We